Author: Maya

First the yays. We have two Office Depots “in town” as in the place south of my little hole in the wall town. I love going in and looking at their clearance section. There is always something cool to be had there. At my regular location a week or so back, they had the reams of the Office Depot brand of high quality paper with 650 pages to each ream instead of 500 on clearance for two bucks a ream. TWO dollars. OMG. I about had a heart attack and promptly bought everything.

Over the weekend I went into the other location (more on that in the woes section of this post) and found envelopes in their clearance section. Not just any envelopes either. They had the bubble, padded plastic large sized envelopes, the kind that a trade size book fits SO nicely into. Now usually these suckers run .97 cents a piece and that’s at Walmart. They’re more expensive at other places. Office Depot had them in packages of 10 clearance for ONE DOLLAR. I was grabbing packages in absolutely glee. I threw them at my kids as fast as I could pick them up.

Office supplies make me happy :lol2:

Now the entire reason I was in Office Depot over the weekend *sigh* I just bought a new Dell printer. Not that my old Dell printer was that old but I’m pretty hard on them and this one had lasted awhile so I gave in and ordered a new one after it quit on me. Now the problem with this is that I’m printing promo stuff that I need to send out THIS week so of course that’s when the old one quits. :cursesign:

Anyway, I ordered a new one, it came in last week. Now this new printer was supposed to come with a 6000 page ink cartridge. I know because I checked because I never buy anything less than 6000 because I go through them too quickly and it’s a pain in the ass to spend all my time ordering new ones. So I get to about page 850 and get a low toner warning. WTF?

I get online to “chat” with Dell because I really don’t want to spend an hour on the phone unable to understand a thing the “representative” is trying to say to me because my call has been routed to Freaking India. *sigh* So I wait forever, get a customer service chick who tells me I need Tech support. Wait forever to get tech support who tells me I need customer service. I scream and pick up the phone ready to froth at the mouth. Finally get someone who says they’ll send me a new cartridge.

I get said cartridge on Friday. I start printing over the weekend. I’m frustrated with the printer itself because it is only printing 10 pages a minute. This is a laser printer that is supposed to print 30 pages a minute. I timed it because it was so God Awful SLOW. And it wouldn’t let me specify to print more than one copy of a document. If I told it to print anything other than 1 copy, it would print 13 pages and get vaporlocked, throw an error message and shut down. And if that weren’t enough, it would pick 2-3 pages at random in the middle of the document to just arbitrarily fuck up and print jibberish on before it would resume printing the regular document.

The icing on the cake? I get to about page 1200 on this nice new 6000 page toner cartridge? ANd I get low toner warning.

I made hubby call them and tell them to expect the printer back on their doorstep as soon as they’d send me a return label and I could get it packed up.

So I was at Office Depot shopping for a new printer. Which I need right now.

I’m going back to HP for my computers and printers from now on. Dell is not good for my blood pressure.

or part of it. The bottom half lol. Completely decorated by the kidlets. Which is what makes it so fun. The tree never looks the same from year to year though we have the same ornaments. They placed most of the red balls toward the top and covered the bottom with the gold. And most of all the other ornaments are things they’ve made themselves whether at home or in school. Oh and there’s the coveted (by me) White House ornaments that my bestest gal pal in Washington sends me every Christmas :worthy:

It’s a positively gorgeous morning here. I woke up to the most spectacular sunrise. Well, the first thing that popped into my head was “Red sky in morning sailor take warning” lol. The sky was a very bright red with golden hues.

It’s about 60 degrees, clear skies, the birds are chirping and it’s starting to rain leaves. I love December in South Texas. It’s truly one of our most gorgeous weather months of the year.

In writing, I’ve written 13 thousand words in the last two days. Im hoping to keep that progress up through Monday which would put me back on track to finish under my self-imposed deadline with ease. So here’s hoping I have another productive day :woot:

I swear I spend half my life marveling at how fast the days go by. I’m back to writing Be With Me. I swear I’ve had so many interruptions to this book. :headscratch:

BUT for the next few days at least, the coast should be clear to jam on some pages. I have to finish this book in December because January is shaping up to be a complete wash. Hubby and I are going to Vegas the first week of January and the second week we’re going out to West Texas hunting. And uhm this book is due Feb 1.

I think I just managed to panic myself. Off to go write some more pages…

The big ass tree is up, and it’s gorgeous. We went four different places before I found the perfect one. It’s not quite as tall as what I was shooting for, but it’s perfectly shaped with no holes and a nine footer fills the space very nicely.

I’ll have to take a pic and post it.

We got the tree up Saturday evening and hubby and I wrapped presents Sunday morning. We still have more shopping to do, but we did the majority before Thanksgiving so we weren’t fighting crowds. The rest I’ll likely be doing online. I heart online shopping in a big, big way.

I’m moving along on Be With Me (Berkley book 3) but I have to put it away for today and probably tomorrow as well because I have edits on Into the Mist. This is probably a good time to say how much I love my editor. And I don’t love her because she’s nice to me. She’s mean. And vicious. And I love her when she gets all vicious on me :lol2: It’s a wonderful, wonderful thing when writer and editor work together to put out an outstanding product. It doesn’t always work that way so I’m especially grateful that we work so well together and don’t work against each other.

The weather that is…

We went from 90 degrees and muggy to 40 degrees and rain, rain and more rain. Makes Christmas tree shopping a tad messy. :oops:

Still in search of the BAT. Haven’t found the right one yet. The rain is supposed to let up in a couple of hours and we’ll venture back out to hopefully find the perfect tree :woot:

I was actually productive over the holiday. We had a six hour drive to my sister’s and I wrote 30 pages during the trip. I snuck in another 18 while we were there and another 10 on the way home and another five after we got home. So in essence, I squeezed in a week’s worth of work in 48 hours. If I can do that one more time, I’ll be caught up and back on schedule :whoo:

So I feel like a grinch. Usually I’m all over the holiday season by now. This year I’m just not feeling it yet. I was talking to hubby about it on the way home from town today and he said well, we’ve been so busy. And yep, that’s it in a nutshell. Our schedules have been insanely hectic for the last couple of months and it hasn’t really dawned on me that Thanksgiving is less than a week away and Thanksgiving always kicks off the Christmas season for me.

So we decided we’re going to try and be more festive :cheer: We’re having a lobster boil this afternoon. Hubby is off all week but the kids go to school Monday and Tuesday so we’re going to go Christmas shopping and spend the day together tomorrow. We’re going to my sister’s for Thanksgiving but we’re coming back early on Friday because the tree must be purchased the day after Thanksgiving and it must go up immediately :whoo:

I’m buying a big ass tree this year. We moved into this house six years ago but I kept buying the same size tree even though we have a huge living room with cathedral ceilings. So screw that. I told hubby that this year I wanted a big ass tree. So we’ll be shopping for the BAT. This time next week BAT will be up in the living room with lots of white lights. And that makes me happy.

is now available!

When a member of the CIA’s premiere counter terrorism unit discovers the woman he loves is a suspected terrorist, he’ll go to any lengths to uncover the truth.

Jules Trehan disappeared without a trace three years ago much to the dismay of her parents and Manuel Ramirez. A counter terrorism specialist, Manny has utilized every agency resource in his attempt to discover what happened to Jules, to no avail.

As suddenly as she disappeared, Jules reappears in a small Colorado town. Injured in an explosion, she’s hospitalized, and Manny rushes to her side, determined not to ever let her go again.

But Jules has one last job to do or Manny’s life will be forfeit. A mission she must complete, even if it means betraying the only man she’s ever loved.

Link to Excerpt.

kinda sucked. As I said in my previous blog, I haven’t seen hubby in forever. He left this morning on a business trip and will be gone all week :cursesign: He has Thanksgiving week off so we’re really, really looking forward to that.

I’m kind of in that post finish-the-book let down that I succumb to with every book. It sucks but it isn’t going away anytime soon. Unfortunately it’s part of my process. I finished the book that would.not.end on Friday. No idea at that point whether I loved it or hated it or was just plain indifferent. I won’t know until I go back to it in edits. I did get any email from my editor today saying she was halfway through reading it and she loved it. Huge relief. That book damn near killed me. It’s ridiculous because it’s one of the funnest books I’ve written but there were other really important relationships in the book apart from the hero and the heroine that I had to nail just right.

Today I basically moped around shuffling my feet and trying to gear up to dive into Be With Me. (Love, love, love this story) But I didn’t want to dive into it on a day when I feel so blah. Just doesn’t feel right to do that to a story I love so much.

So tonight I’m just mellowing out, listening to some Tim McGraw on iTunes (thanks to hubby for getting me the really good speakers for my new desktop) :worthy: Taking a few notes and re-reading what I already have on Be With Me.

Oh and I booked the Vegas trip this morning then called a girlfriend of mine to see if her and her husband wanted to join us in January. :whoo:

Friday, I’m writing like a fiend, desperate to finish the book that will.not.end. I see hubby pop up on IM around noon. Now, a little backstory, I haven’t seen him in like two weeks. I mean, we pass each other coming and going, but he’s been swamped at work, long hours, and I’ve been writing to meet my deadline on the story that will.not.end. So I message him and say “What are the odds that you’ll get home at a decent hour today”

To which he responds “Excellent. Why?”

Me: Because I’m going to finish this goddamn book if it KILLS me and then I want to go do something. I want out of this house.

Him: Cool, figure it out and I’ll be home in time for us to go get the kids together.

So I busted ass and finished the book at 2:15. Hubby gets home at 2:30 and I’m like oh hi, who are you again?

We took the evening off, left cell phones off and went and played some poker. I swear we’re turning into pussies though. By 11 we were dying and ready to go home.

All in all though it was a nice break. For Christmas this year, we’re going to take a trip to Vegas (first week of Jan) because we’ve both been so busy and we could use the down time together. Personally, I can’t wait.